News / NHS under fire over Tamiflu stockpile

Commons public accounts committee (PAC) chair Margaret Hodge has called on the Department of Health to review how it makes decisions on stockpiling medicines, claiming the NHS has ‘squandered’ £74m of public money on a flu drug.

Responding to a National Audit Office memorandum, produced ahead of a PAC hearing in June, Ms Hodge was scathing of the fact that 6.5 million units of the drug Tamiflu had to be thrown away during the 2009/10 flu pandemic because of poor record-keeping in the NHS.

The drug has to be kept refrigerated at below 8ºC, but the NAO said lack of records meant it had to be ‘written off’. She called this ‘a shocking example of incompetence’, and added: ‘There is simply no excuse for this waste.’

Between 2009/10 and 2012/13, 2.4 million units of Tamiflu were used and in the same period, a further 3.5 million units were written off as they had come to the end of their shelf life. Between 2006/07 and 2012/13, the Department purchased almost 40 million units at a cost of £424m.

Ms Hodge said it was ‘extremely worrying’ to find that the government had bought so much of the drug, even though there were question marks over its effectiveness.

‘Although Tamiflu speeds up recovery times, experts do not agree over its ability to reduce complications and hospitalisations,’ she said.

  And she added: ‘It is essential, not only for the public purse, but for public safety, that the Department of Health carefully examines how it stockpiles medicines in the future.’